I’ve been looking around the twitter-spheroid and blago-blogs and finding that lots of people are writing “pi-ku”s today, a haiku about pi, in honor of pi day:
you go around once
and make an infinity,
of digits that is
But what is a pi-ku, really? Is a “haiku about pi” the best we can do? What about my wife’s suggestion (which she came across from Powell’s Bookstore) , where the syllables pay homage to pi’s most well known digits? Here’s the formula:
— First line: 3 syllables
— Second line: 1 syllable
— Third line: 4 syllables
and used in a sentence poem:
i know, of
pi,
pi squared digits
But we can get grosser than that. What about longer pi-ku sequences, traversing the decimal-dance of pi’s digits:
(3) from where does
(1) pi
(4) originate?
(1) is
(5) it an integral
(9) half (neg why dee ex plus ex dee why)?
(2) maybe
(6) riemann zeta at 2,
(5) times six, square root is
But I digress. How can you contort pi into your poetry? Leave your poems in the comments, and don’t forget to enjoy your favorite kind of pi to celebrate the sweetness and the arbitrary transcendental numbers that permeate our limited understanding of the universe. Today I enjoyed smitten kitchen’s apple pie cookies. Smaller size, same great ratio of circumference to diameter.
Links
[1] Powell’s Bookstore’s Facebook Conversation, Pi Day 2013
[2] my favorite approximations of pi, on github
[3] smitten kitchen’s apple pie cookies
that's gross 